


While She Was Somewhere Being Free

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Series: 1960s [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Drug Use, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 16:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: More than anything, Samantha doesn't want to be trapped again.





	While She Was Somewhere Being Free

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to my fic "How To Expand Your Mind." I'd recommend reading that one first, but you can probably get along all right here.
> 
> The title is from "Cactus Tree," possibly the best Joni Mitchell song, but I'm indecisive. 
> 
> I don't own The X-Files or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

 

The first place she goes is a farm.  A berry farm, because she sees the sign that says “PICKERS WANTED,” sees how many bushes there are, and figures that it’s something she can do where she won’t stick out too much.  She says her name is Susan.  She thinks she liked an actress with that name, back before. 

She gets a sandwich with her day’s pay—there’s not enough mustard but it’s _her_ sandwich.  She spends the night sheltering under a tree on the farm, and she doesn’t even mind when it rains a little.  She keeps that routine up for a few days, until the woman from the farm, Mrs. Thompson, sees her settling in, one night.  “What’re you doing there, honey?” she asks.  “Don’t you have any place else to go?”

“No, ma’am,” she says.  She remembers that from somewhere: always be polite to adults.

“It’s Susan, isn’t it?” Mrs. Thompson says, and she nods.  “How old are you, Susan?”

“I’m fourteen,” she says.  She thinks it’s right.

Mrs. Thompson studies her and sighs.  “Why don’t you come in with me?” she asks.  “At least for tonight.  It looks like it could storm.”

Back at the house, the Thompsons don’t ask her too many questions.  She says her parents are gone, because they are, gone out of her mind.  There isn’t anybody, she says.  And they let her stay, and tonight turns into days and weeks and months.  She helps out on the farm, earns her room and board and money besides.  She saves it in a bag under her mattress.  That’s all hers.

It all goes smoothly enough until she’s sixteen, and one day she and Mrs. Thompson are washing the dishes, and Mrs. Thompson says casually, in their course of their conversation, “We think of you as a daughter, you know.” 

It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong.  She’s not their daughter.  Being someone’s daughter means being part of their family, and that means you have to listen to them and do what they tell you to and stay where they tell you to.  That would mean she’s stuck in this house now.  Trapped again.

She counts the money in her bag that night.  Then she goes to the bus depot, and soon she’s on her way west.

 

She’s heard about San Francisco, about the Haight, so that’s where she goes.  She gets a job as a waitress.  She says her name is Scarlett.  She likes that it’s a color.

She lives with a girl named Alice, who’s also out there on her own.  Alice talks about her father a lot.  He is a tool of the man.  “So I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Alice says one night.  “He’s such a pig.  My whole family are pigs.”  She takes a drag on her cigarette.  “So I came here.  What about you, Scarlett?  Are your family a bunch of pigs too?”

She can’t answer that one.  She’d like to be able to.  Even if her family were a bunch of pigs, she’d like to know about it.  She shrugs a little bit.  “I guess so,” she says.  “But I have a brother, and he’s cool.”

“Yeah?” Alice says.  “What’s he like?”

“He’s older than me,” she says.  “He’s got brown hair, and he teases me.”  Alice is still looking at her, so she adds more.  “He’s really smart.  Really with it.  We have great talks about everything.  He’s not like everyone else, you know.  He really cares about this world and what we’re doing to it.”

“How come you didn’t come out here together, then?” Alice asks.

“Oh, he’s going to,” she says.  “Really soon.  We’re going to live together, then.”

“I don’t even think you have a brother,” Alice says, later that year.  She’s already moving then, going to live with some other girls who don’t steal her love beads, so to hell with Alice, but it still hurts to hear.  She does have a brother.  She _knows_ she has a brother.  Maybe not everything she’s said about him is true. He didn’t send her those Bob Dylan records; she doesn’t even know if he loves Bob Dylan.  She doesn’t call him up when she says that’s what she’s doing: she just walks to the phone booth on the corner and sits there for a while and tries to see if she can remember anything.  But he’s real. 

“I do have a brother,” she says.  “I do.” 

 

She meets Ray at a party.  They have a long talk about how terrible the war is.  She tells him her name is Summer.  She knows a lot of girls who give themselves names like that.

Ray plays the guitar, and he’s a good kisser.  Sometimes they smoke and listen to records together.  They go to demonstrations.  She loses her virginity on his lumpy futon.

She likes him.  Likes him a lot until one day he introduces her to a friend of his: “This is Summer.  She’s my old lady.”  That’s too much.  That means something.  She doesn’t want to be anybody’s.

The Haight’s not that big, but it’s big enough to get lost in, if you try.  She avoids their old haunts, finds new roommates, changes her hair.  She doesn’t see Ray again.  She did like the way he kissed.  But that’s not enough.

 

Tricia wants someone to paint.  She poses for Tricia, lying back on her couch in a yellow dress with her hair falling around her, and after that they eat dinner together, and after that they kiss, and after that she spends the night.  She tells Tricia her name is Shelley.  She’s been reading _Frankenstein_ , drawn to the idea of monstrous creations.

“Let’s not take this too seriously,” she says the next morning, wrapped in Tricia’s bedsheet.  That seems to work for Tricia too.  They don’t see each other all the time, just when Tricia wants to paint her, and usually it goes like the first time.  But there’s no belonging to each other.

At a party one night at Tricia’s apartment, she takes LSD, and at first it’s just colors, like everyone’s talked about, colors and lights, bright bright lights, the lights are too bright, right in her eyes, and she sees someone reaching out for her, she thinks it must be her brother, and she stretches to grab his hand, stretches as hard as she can but she can’t reach him, it’s too far and she can’t see his face, she can’t see his face can’t remember his face can’t remember anything just more lights now bright bright too bright and someone is jabbing something into her it hurts and they’re all around her again those men and someone is jabbing something into her she wants it to stop she wants to die and the next thing she knows she’s lying there with her head in Tricia’s lap, and Tricia is stroking her hair.

She tries to sit up.  “Woah,” Tricia says.  “Shelley, baby, take it easy.  You’re okay.  You’re okay.”  She picks up a class of water.  “Drink a little, okay?”

She tries to.  Her mouth is dry.  The light is outside the windows now.  “What happened?” she asks.

“Bad trip,” Tricia says.  “Real bad.”  She strokes her hair again.  “You’re okay now, though.”

She sips at the water.  “I thought…” she says and breaks off.   No one needs to know what she thought.

“Yeah, I know,” Tricia says.  “You were freaking out.”

“What do you mean, freaking out?” she asks.

“You kept saying something about tests,” Tricia says.  “Something about wanting the tests to stop.  And the lights being too bright and things hurting.  And you were asking where your brother was.”

“Oh,” she says.  And she tries to shrug and smile and say that’s weird, she doesn’t know why she would say any of that, but some of the words don’t make it out, and the ones that do make it out she doesn’t think Tricia believes.

The next time Tricia wants to paint her she says she’s busy.  And the next.  And the next.

 

Summer of Love, but not everyone is all that loving: some jerky guys are hassling two teenage girls who look like they just got here five minutes ago.  “Get lost,” she says, coming up and putting her arm around one of the girls, and she must sound tough, she guesses, because they do, and she turns and smiles at the girls.  “Hi, I’m Suzanne,” she says.  She really loves the Judy Collins song.

One girl is Linda and the other one is Donna, and they’re both sixteen, and they did just get here today, on a bus from Sacramento.  “We wanted to be part of it all,” Linda says, “the whole scene, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says.  “I know.”

“How long have you been here?” Linda asks.

“About three years now,” she says.

“That’s so nifty,” Donna says.

“Do you two have somewhere to stay?” she asks.  “Do you know anybody here?”

“We know you, Suzanne,” Donna says, and her eyes are big and innocent, and she looks absolutely sure that nothing bad could ever, ever happen to her.

She takes them back with her for the night, because what else can she do?  Her roommates don’t even comment; there’s always someone crashing there now, someone who wants to check the place out, hear the music, turn on, tune in, drop out.  The two of them hang on her every word; she’s in charge here now, she realizes with a start.  She wonders why that doesn’t make her feel better.

The next morning, she takes them to the Switchboard so they can find somewhere else to stay.  They hug her goodbye, and she hugs them back: it’s easier to like people when you’re not stuck with them. 

She doesn’t like being stuck with any person or any place (although she thinks she wouldn’t mind being stuck with her brother).  Right now she thinks she might be stuck with San Francisco.  Sometimes she thinks she should stay, because it’s a good place to get lost in, safer than other places.  But even that’s not so true anymore, as the summer wears on and turns into fall, as the overcrowding becomes emptiness.  She goes to the Death of the Hippie funeral.  She thinks it’s time to move on.

 

She’s at an antiwar rally in DC.  She took the bus out here with a bunch of other people.  She’s told them her name is Serena.  Peace is on her mind these days.

They’re at the Pentagon when she sees him with some other soldiers.  It’s Jeff.  Jeff who was her…well, he wasn’t her brother, because she already has a brother.  He was something, though.  Jeff who was her something.

A part of her thinks _Of course he would be here, of course he would be with them, you can’t trust anyone, anyone at all, you should know that by now_.  And a part of her remembers the two of them playing together, how they tied one end of a jump rope to a tree and he turned the other end and she jumped and jumped so high she thought she might be able to fly away.  But most of her feels cold and sweaty because he’s looking in her direction.  She ducks down behind her sign.  WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS.  She elbows past people, mutters she doesn’t know what, but there are so many of them.  She’ll never get out of this crowd.  She’ll never get out.

She doesn’t know how she ends up further down the sidewalk, dodging into a doorway, still holding the sign in front of her face.  She shivers and shivers.

 

“Hello again!” she says, smiling, as she joins the  seemingly endless line for the toilets.  It’s the woman she helped up from the mud yesterday (it’s so slippery here), soon after she got to Woodstock.  “I’m Skye, by the way,” she adds.  She likes the idea of always being outside.

The other woman smiles back.  “I’m Dana,” she says.  “Thanks again for yesterday.”

“Oh, no problem!” she says.  “How are you liking the music?”

“It’s really nice,” Dana says.  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like this—some friends talked me into coming.  It’s not really my scene.  But it’s actually a lot of fun.  Even if it is muddy.”  She glances down at her jeans, which are still dirty from yesterday.  “How about you?”

“Oh, I love it,” she says.  “I love anything like this.  Did you come with a lot of friends?”

“Yeah,” Dana says.  “There’s eight of us all together.  All in one van, so it’s a little crazy.”

She laughs.  “I came with a bunch of other people too,” she says.  “So I know what you mean.”

“I do like them,” Dana says, “most of the time.  But, you know, there’s always something.  Like we have these two friends who don’t seem to understand that you can’t have sex in a van with six other people.”

“Oof,” she says.  “But I guess if there’s nowhere else to go…”

“Then they can wait until we get home,” Dana says.  “I came with my husband, and we’re controlling ourselves.”

“You’re married?”  She sees the ring. 

“Yeah,” Dana says, smiling.  “Just got married last month, actually.  After I graduated.”  She’s scanning her face.  “Speaking of which…do I know you?”

No.  “I don’t think so,” she says.  She can’t smile anymore.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Dana says.  “I was just thinking we might have gone to college together or something.  But you must just look like someone else.”  She shrugs, smiling.

She lets out a breath.  “Yeah, I didn’t go to college,” she says.  “So I must.”  Dana doesn’t seem to think anything more of it and starts talking about the music again, and she’s able to join in too, after a few more minutes.

“See you, Dana!” she says, when they get to the end of the line.  Dana waves goodbye, and she flashes her a peace sign before moving off.

They bump into each other again, the last morning, when everyone’s heading home.  “Hi,” Dana says, when she sees her.  “Skye, right?  How’d you like the rest of the festival?”

“Oh, it was great,” she says.  “All the music…all the people…”  Plenty of people, but no one who really knows her: that’s the best kind of place.  Somewhere you can meet and part, connect for a moment and pass on.  No one who can make a claim. Neither lonely nor trapped.  “How about you?”

“I had fun,” Dana says.  “I’m looking forward to getting home, though.  I’m starting medical school at the beginning of September, so there’s a lot to do.”

“Medical school?” she says.  “That’s really neat.”

“Thanks,” Dana says.  “Oh, here come my friends.  Well, goodbye, Skye.  Have a good trip home.”

“You too, Dana,” she says.  She hugs her goodbye, but then she regrets it, because she doesn’t like the way Dana is looking at her face.  She pulls back.  “Bye,” she says quickly, and she turns and pushes off into the crowd.

There are so many people that it takes a while to get anywhere.  She thinks she hears a voice calling after her, a voice calling, “Wait!”  But if there is a voice, she ignores it.  She wants to keep going.


End file.
